Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist (2022) A Pilgrim’s Progress from Thatcher to Covid (Review)

Adding to the mounting list of films reflecting our collective experience of coronavirus in the last two years comes the bluntly titled Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist. Obviously, the thought of a film centred around COVID-19 is bound to turn off some audiences, so let me say that this debut feature from writer/director Brett Gregory (whose previous credits include music documentaries Iceland: Beyond Sigur Ros (2010), Manchester: Beyond Oasis (2012) and Liverpool: Beyond The Beatles (2014)) is about more than the new C word – it is a deeply experimental, hyperreal account of this country, and specifically Greater Manchester, over the last forty years; exploring the ongoing rot that set in from Thatcher’s Conservative premierships and the continuing neoliberal policies of successive governments via the warped, troubled and embittered perspective of one man at various stages of his life and those he has encountered across the years. In the end, the contagion is just a handy device that illustrates how we are, as a society, routinely failed by those we elect to do our bidding.

Once upon a time in a land that God forgot lived an angry old man who hated his mother more than anything. He hated her more than the king who loved his food. He hated her more than the politicians who stole from the people. And he hated her more than the dead who had left him behind.

Through a somewhat tart narration, the film introduces us to a lonely middle-aged man called Jack (David Howell), describing how his life has been fuelled by the hatred he feels for his mother and by the disadvantages he has faced in society as a whole. As the pandemic begins to tighten its grip on the nation in early 2020, Jack is a bloated, booze-fuelled and depressive mess, isolated in his Manchester flat, receiving missives of grief on his mobile phone. But to understand Jack now, we must experience Jack’s youth and hear testimonies from those who know, or indeed knew, him. Working on a micro-budget, Gregory knows the effectiveness of the monologue and, just like Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (1988) or, arguably more influentially fitting, Alan Clarke’s adaptation of Road (1987), these dynamically propel the message and themes that the filmmaker wishes to get across. We meet Jack as a young prepubescent boy (played by Reuben Clarke, of Peaky Blinders and definitely one to watch) out on the moors of the upper Calder Valley, searching for his dog Shandy, during the miners’ strike of 1984. Even at this early age, Jack is a troubled and damaged soul, unhappy at home thanks to his mum’s new fella and feeling like an outcast at school on account of his scholarly interests and his out of town accent. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Jack seems determined to fit in; dressed almost like a miniature of a striking miner, in an oversized woolly beanie and donkey jacket, his cherubic youthful face repeatedly twisted into confrontation and anguish. Above him towers the Stoodley Pike monument, the commemoration of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo which Jack describes as a lighthouse and will continue to loom large in his life as we shall see later. We also go on to meet Jack as a young man at university in 1992, all Adidas trackies and E-fuelled elliptical rants. Played by a twitchy, mercurial James Ward, Jack has achieved the ambition he has always harboured but has found the happiness and contentment he expected wholly absent. The monologues are vivid, gritty tone poems, often portrayed with a kind of spittle-flecked urgency reminiscent of David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s seminal Naked (1992), another story of an alienated Mancunian who has consumed too deep and too well of obsessive, enraged bitterness to fill up the soul-lacerating emptiness he feels from significant loss and grief.

We also meet the many people who know, or have come into contact with, Jack throughout the years; the estranged sister who recalls, from before various drug paraphernalia, how Jack would ‘direct’ her and their other sibling to re-enact the final moments of Jaws as children, the family sofa standing in for the boat that really needed to be bigger. An English teacher who fondly recalls teaching Jack’s fierce intellect at secondary school, and a neighbour and care home worker who, against her better judgement, stumbles into present-day Jack’s meltdown, to name but a few. Each of these characters possesses items that illustrate their personalities and none more so than in the choice of mugs they choose to drink from. There’s some sly humour to be had here to as we witness a born again Christian drink from a Stone Roses mug proclaiming ‘I am the Resurrection and I am the Light‘, whilst the flakey, hygiene-obsessed care worker who fails to connect with Jack in lockdown has the legend ‘I Don’t Care Who Dies in a Movie as Long as the Dog Lives’ (I was also amused that the camera pans down to a box marked ‘Fragile‘ during her monologue to, just to make the point further). But oddly, and indeed tellingly, each character possesses the same print; The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

Gregory’s film wears many influences on its sleeve, but I feel this recurring motif is the key to understanding the film as a whole. The 16th Century Dutch artist’s triptych is comprised of a multitude of micro-portraits that, taken together, form the overall image; a paean to creation and the futility of humankind. Viewed in this context, Nobody Love You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist runs parallel to Bosch’s work, sharing a broad, universal narrative canvas made up of several micro-narratives. Gregory isn’t just influenced by post-medieval paintings either, as it’s possible to see similarities in his film with the work of John Bunyan and Geoffrey Chaucer too. Like the characters in those picaresque morality tales, Jack too is the subject of exile and pilgrimage, a tortured everyman cast upon the tumultuous seas of a society in unforgiving flux. When we meet Jack again in the present day wastelands of Covid Britain, he is deeply disturbed; scaling the hills towards Stoodley Pike, lugging a suitcase whose unseen contents suggest a litany of his woes. The monument of his childhood making good on his earlier comparison as a beacon and serving as an endpoint of this particular pilgrim’s progress.

It doesn’t always work, however. The narration lends a necessary fantastical edge to the gritty social realism but it often comes off in the performance as too arch and pretentious. Likewise, a framing device involving an estranged elderly relative on Jack’s answerphone is unconvincing; this unseen satire of True Blue, Daily Mail-reading Middle England played too large and too comedically (she relays her email address at one point which begins “CharlesandDianaForever“) to comfortably sit alongside the rough-hewn grit. But on the whole, Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Live ticks so many of my boxes that I can forgive these minor missteps. Any film that is clearly indebted to the likes of Alan Clarke (I’ve already mentioned Road, but the other film it reminds me of is 1974’s Penda’s Fen), Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Stanley Kubrick (The Shining is referenced often) to name but a few, mixed in with the art and literature influences I’ve previously mentioned (and potentially the work of Tony Harrison, most notably V of course) gets a thumbs up from me, but it is worth pointing out that Gregory creates a distinctive and original work in its own right.

It is also a film that resonated deeply with me too. As someone from the North West myself, I recognise much of what Gregory is depicting here. I’m a little bit younger, but I remember the miners’ strike and Madchester, and I too felt precariously positioned as a working-class male with an affinity for art and culture beyond the standards of football and pop. To this day I see the salted battlefields of Thatcher’s victory over the working class and the negative effects of the Blairite and Brexit grift upon those same people. The race to the bottom, the fallout from divide and rule, the wounded beast of collective masculinity and the managed decline of pivotal services that were once hard-won as a necessary right by a previous generation and now hard missed in the double whammy of a recession and a pandemic, these are all too apparent in my daily life and are conveyed upon the screen with an absorbing, thought-provoking flair by an innovative magpie-like maverick whose wealth of ideas ensures that he has created something truly impressive from a shoestring. Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist is a bold and striking debut and I honestly cannot wait to see what Gregory does next.

Mark on Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist